Sigismund was christened the namesake of his mother's maternal grandfather, Emperor Sigismund, who had died in 1437.
Sigismund faced the challenge of consolidating internal power in order to face external threats to the country. During Alexander's reign, the law Nihil novi had been instituted, which forbade Kings of Poland from enacting laws without the consent of the Sejm. This proved crippling to Sigismund's dealings with his szlachta and magnates.
Despite this Achilles heel, he established (1527) a conscription army and the bureaucracy needed to finance it.
Intermittently at war with Vasily III of Muscovy, starting in 1507 (before his army was fully under his command), 1514 marked the fall of Smolensk (under Polish domination) to the Muscovite forces (which lent force to his arguments for the necessity of a standing army). 1515 he entered an alliance with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I.
Polish-Lithuanian Coat-of-Arms.
In return for Maximilian lending weight to the provisions of the 2nd Peace of Thorn, Sigismund consented to the marriage of the children of Vladislaus II of Bohemia and Hungary, his brother, to the grandchildren of Maximilian. Through this double marriage contract, Bohemia and Hungary passed to the House of Habsburg in 1526, on the death of Sigismund's nephew, Louis II.
Sigismund was a Humanist. He and his third consort, Bona Sforza, daughter of Gian Galeazzo Sforza of Milan, were both patrons of Renaissance culture, which under them began to flourish in Poland and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
On Sigismund's death, his son Sigismund II August became the last Jagiellon king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania.
Sigismund I the Old
Polish 200-złotybanknote with likeness of Sigismund (Zygmunt) I the Old.
